RUSH: The media was just orgasming over this. They couldn’t get enough of it. It was the storyline. It was, “Oh, what a great country. Oh, we’ve overcome,” all of this. Well, when they went and talked to Dungy and Lovie Smith about it, they didn’t fall in line. Dungy and Lovie Smith said, “You know, that’s not what’s important to us.” I don’t have the exact quotes, but I could dig ’em up.

Dungy said that the important thing was, “Yeah, we’ve got two black head coaches here, but two men of God. Two devoutly Christian men have risen to the pinnacle.” That was what Dungy said. That, to him, was what was noteworthy about this Super Bowl. He didn’t relegate the racial component to irrelevancy, but it was not the most important thing to him — and the media?

You could see they just didn’t quite understand. They wanted these two guys to jump on the first two black coaches in the Super Bowl storyline and just take it all the way to end zone. They just wanted that to be the thing, the greatest thing. “Oh, wow, look at us! We’re cool! Look,” and the media was thinking, “Look what we made happen because we’re the ones who have been pressuring these owners to hire people,” the Rooney Rule and so forth.

The media said, “Look what we did,” and here these two guys say, “No, we’re Christians first.” I’m just telling you that that’s why it is thought that there’s a “subculture” of Christianity, the Christian right in the NFL. It makes people nervous. So Dungy saying what he said about Michael Sam, the other leg that he’s standing on there — this public Christianity, devout Christian stuff — makes people nervous.

That will help and facilitate sportswriters dumping on Dungy, ’cause they already don’t like that about him. And then if they want to, they can blame his Christianity for his views on Michael Sam and his statement that if he were a coach, he wouldn’t draft him. “Yeah…” They probably are whispering this to each other already. These sportswriters talk. “Yeah, you know the real reason?”

I can hear them now.

“The real reason is he’s a Christian. You know what THEY think about gays. That’s why! He’s not gonna say that but that’s why.” I guarantee that undercurrent is out there circulating, and it’ll pop up. It’s effervescing, and it will rise to the top, if it hasn’t already. I haven’t looked. I haven’t spent any time looking at every sports media outlet seeing what people are saying, that may have already been said and reached the surface.